Published:
1st edition, 100 copies: Dec. 2007
2nd edition, 100 copies: Sept. 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9868890-1-1
Price: $10 CDN/US including shipping
25 pages
21 poems
Status: Out of Print. However, a bound photocopy can be ordered from beedeecee@videotron.ca for $15 CA or US including postage.
- Nina Bruck was interviewed and read from Still Light on CBC Radio 1, The Sunday Edition (host: Michael Enright), and was featured on CBC TV’s Montreal Matters.
- Winner of the 2008 Writer’s Circle of Durham Region Poetry Chapbook Challenge
Judges’ comments:
The poetry: This collection is a mature, wry, and accessible series of delightful, sure and confident poems. It is peopled with clearly evoked characters, places, and times – spanning the period from the ‘30s to the present – and captures exactly the different ages the poet lives through. There is no self-pity here, despite some rough times: radiation treatments faced with the hilarity of accurate observation (“Three young technicians aim my breast / at The Machine, / flee to another room”); the memory of a dead father beginning to fade, his cane in the basement “casting no shadows”; and the elegant sense that even after a lengthy failed marriage, the better memories will keep returning (“I made myself a dry martini, / missing the cool precision of his lemon peeler – / its perfect spiral”). And then there’s a playful but expert wordplay, the kind of thing that continues to make poetry, despite the seriousness of the theme, fun (“to the cold heat / in the sweat’s pit / where the orange rots / then the hot’s not / to the deaf eyes / and the tom thumb / and the legs bite / where the clocks run / and the song stops / on the second hand / and there’s no land / to land on”).
The chapbook: The book displays perfect, simple production values, the cover unadorned and of the same colour as the pages. Its outsized format and generous typeface contribute to the delight and seriousness of the collection. We have nothing but praise for the publisher’s production of this book.
*The two other winners were Teresa Donat Banks for Resident Alien and Bill Howell for Ghost Test Flights.SPIRAL
The day my husband left
our G.P. choked on oaths un-Hippocratic.
“If pain persists,” he cried,
“throw his clothes out the window.”
I watched them fly: socks, shorts, shirts –
every single tie.
The day my husband left
I made myself a dry martini,
missing the cool precision of his lemon peeler –
its perfect spiral.